There are times in life where something is so bad, so utterly, terribly, outrageously bad that it is near impossible to react immediately afterwards. Such was the case a few weeks ago when I saw the video rant posted by Ms. Alexandra Wallace about Asians in the Library, and now again after reading this letter to the editor by a Mr. Jeffrey Parsons about Mr. Roger Ebert’s scathing review of Battle: L.A.
From Jeffrey Parsons:
I read your temper tantrum about “Battle: Los Angeles,” and just thought I’d send you a note.
First, I’m a former national merit scholar with a degree in engineering. And I’ve worked as an engineer and as a leader of engineers for well over a decade. So I feel very comfortable not only asserting my intelligence, but also in claiming to be smarter than you. My wife is a concert violinist and teacher who speaks three languages. I feel safe saying she’s also smarter than you.
We both enjoyed “Battle: Los Angeles.” It was exactly the movie it promised to be. And it was fun from beginning to end.
I could engage in a very detailed rebuttal of your ‘review’, pointing out things like your two-and-one-half star review of" Independence Day" (which seems to indicate that 'stick figure’ enemies faced by American heroes didn’t always drive you into a blind rage). More to the point, I could laugh at your idiotic four-star review of “Green Zone,” as that seems more relevant (I imagine if there had been a scene of a US soldier raping a stick figure alien, or perhaps it were revealed that George Bush set the whole thing up, you’d have loved “B:LA”).
But that’s all really beside the point. Because while I could point out your flaws as a movie reviewer – and they are numerous – and how you let your poorly-thought-out ideology infest everything you do now, like a child who has learned a new swear word, the real problem is that you’re just a joyless asshole. You clearly don’t enjoy movies anymore, if you ever did (there are many who think that even failed screenwriters such as yourself don’t become critics primarily because they can’t write, but because they’re narcissistic and believe their failure to be the fault of a 'system’ that does not respect their greater talent, so they channel that anger into nitpicking the work of more capable people … but I digress).
I’d wish bad things on you, Roger, but frankly I can’t imagine anything worse than what you are.
But just a few words of advice: when you find yourself in a position where your only argument is that everyone but you is an 'idiot’ (by the way, are all your readers idiots? Because they’ve voted the movie much higher than you), it’s time to retire. Then you can spend all day retweeting HuffPo headlines! Think how happy you’ll be.
“Well,” I thought to myself after it all sank in, “how about I just write a nice little faux letter back to Mr. Parsons, just to show him how appreciated such an enlightened and intelligent response such as his evoked the most intelligent of intelligent discussions possible only capable of smart people?”
So I did.
Dear Mr. Parsons,
There are times in life where someone’s stupidity shines so brightly on their forehead that I am forced to wear sunglasses as to avoid getting cataracts.
Mr. Parsons, you are by far one of the most incompetent writers I have ever read. It is almost out of sheer luck that you are a engineer since your idiocy in the realm of outstandingly bad ad hominem attacks would have crippled any self-respecting English or Rhetoric department that was as unfortunate as to produce you as an alumni, and would have forced them into seppuku or self-blinding for the sake of saving face and reputation. But even then I am being unkind to the Engineering department from whence you spawned from since I am confident they themselves are tenfold more competent and intelligent than you believe yourself to be.
Mr. Parsons, while I could point out your flaws as a writer and a person and how you let your poorly-thought-out ideology infest everything you touch like herpes, or that you are like a child who has recently discovered fart and boob jokes, the real problem is that you’re just a goddamn idiot. You clearly don’t appreciate the processes known as critical, logical, or even rational thought anymore, if you ever did (there are many who think that even poor excuses of smucks such as yourself don’t accomplish anything significant after becoming a national merit scholar over ten years ago because your life has since stagnated into mediocrity, but because you’re narcissistic and believe your mediocrity and insignificance to be the fault of a 'system’ that does not respect your greater talent, so you channel your stupidity into nitpicking the work of people a thousand-fold more knowledgable of a art form you could never ever dream of comprehending even in a thousand year lifespan… but I digress).
I’d hope to find stupider things than you, Mr. Parsons, but frankly I can’t imagine anything more stupidly blubbering than what you are.
But just a few words of advice: when you find yourself in a position where your only argument is that anyone that dislikes what you like is an idiot and an asshole, it’s time to take your head out of your own ass and to retire from ever engaging in anything remotely intelligent. Then you can spend all day swimming in your own spew of self-righteousness and stupidity! Think how happy you’ll be.
On Wednesday evening I sat down dead center, facing the giant IMAX projector. I was about twenty minutes early, and looking around I immediately noticed a jarring demographic that was primarily male, the occasional female friend here and there amongst groups of college to post-college men. The advertising for Sucker Punch had certainly hit its demographic mark.
Minutes passed and before I knew it, the opening montage of Baby Doll’s life going into shambles intercut with telephoto focuses on details and anachronistic, nondiegetic music coinciding was unfolding in classic Zack Snyder style. It was exceptional, as expected.
Then two hours passed, and as I left the theater I felt a twinge of sadness, shame, and disappointment. Amidst the onscreen explosions, grandeur aerials and gratuitous action scenes involving scantily clad women, I felt absolutely nothing – no excitement, no awe, not even a moment of fun. What I had witnessed was a movie that had failed on multiple levels, levels that with perhaps more introspect and tasteful aesthetic finesse could have so easily made Snyder’s original story work. The trouble, I suspect, is that Snyder doesn’t truly understand the goals he aspires towards: here he attempts to bask in the glory of the ridiculous and obscure known and beloved by anime fans alike and simultaneously tries to empower the very women he forces into the most misogynistic of lens possible. The saddest part is that I think this was completely unintentional. I asked myself,
Where did everything go wrong?
It seems the concept of Sucker Punch was doomed to go wrong easily or burdened to succeed difficultly from its inception. For starters, Snyder attempted the inexplicable and, frankly, the impossible – to tout five young women as individualistic, strong, and enduring while filming them in the most traditional of male gazes possible. I’m speaking, of course, of the same paradox that arises with many superheroines and supposed strong women that could just as easily be mistaken for supermodels if we didn’t see them in action.
There is nothing wrong with a strong female that also happens to be sexually attractive. There is, however, a strong discrepancy in how one chooses to frame and focus on said strong female – and in the case of Sucker Punch, the framing only allows our five heroines to be heroic in a fantasy realm; back in reality, they’re just as helpless and just as brutalized by the very men they fantasize to overcome. Fantasy, it seems, is just a means of escapism where they can imagine and project their own ideas of a power that does not exist nor are given the opportunity – by Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya – to ever truly practice in the realm that matters, their immediate reality.
As they scheme and scream and suffer, the actresses go along with Mr. Snyder’s pretense that this fantasia of misogyny is really a feminist fable of empowerment.
It is not just that the women are attired in garish boudoir fashions, cropped schoolgirl uniforms and the latest action lingerie. With a touch of humor — with any at all — “Sucker Punch,” which Mr. Snyder wrote with Steve Shibuya, might have acknowledged the campy, kinky aspects of its premise. But even as it exploits, within the hypocritical constraints of the PG-13 rating, salacious images of exposed flesh and threatened innocence, the film also self-righteously traffics in moral outrage.
Focus and framing are everything, and what I saw on screen was a far cry from the female empowerment Snyder enthusiastically and earnestly proclaimed in interviews. Baby Doll’s reality, for starters, is catapulted into a women’s mental asylum that, in turn, exploits its girls’ budding sexual assets to lure in lecherous, well-to-do customers who simply can’t settle for a regular brothel or strip club – their libido can only be satisfied by taking advantage of women with no power or means to defend themselves. If that isn’t already a difficult scenario to project female empowerment that isn’t a caricature, we’ve even got the girls romping around the corridors in what I can only assume is non-standard mental patient attire and more attuned to burlesque teasers. Now top all of this off with an antagonist so hideous, so grotesquely misogynistic and leering that his twitching pencil moustache was only a sick reminder that this man, Blue, was a pimp. A despicable, disgusting, degenerate pimp – who was taking advantage of mentally instituted girls.
Numerous times throughout the film I found myself shifting uncomfortably as men pimped, slapped, licked, kissed, grabbed, and shot terrified, crying, and (mostly) passive women in the perceived reality. This is not the discomfort that arises from having ideas or thematics challenged – it was the sort that makes you feel ashamed of yourself, where you feel like a voyeur who should be doing something to stop what’s happening on screen rather than passively watching it happen, where you start beginning to question your own sense of morality for even looking at the events unfold. Not once are any of these women given the dignity to retaliate, to compose themselves from terror and contemplate the remaining control of their own lives, or even revel in the reasons why they were locked up in the asylum to begin with; the closest this comes to is Sweet Pea wearing her sibling protectiveness on her sleeve, and her sister Rocket responding accordingly. Otherwise, there is not one ounce of reprieve for these women in reality, not a moment where self-respect is evident or allowed: Snyder wants us to see victims, and we see them all right; where female empowerment comes into all of this is victimizing reality is beyond me.
Then there were the fantasy sequences.
What is astounding that for a film that extols feminism as an appeal, somehow Baby Doll, Sweat Pea, Rocket, Amber and Blondie imagine themselves to be clad in what is nothing short of scant. Baby Doll clashes onscreen in pig tails, high heels, thigh-high stockings, a mini skirt and midriff-baring schoolgirl top that echoes suspiciously of male fantasies regarding Catholic or Japanese school girls; her colleagues’ attires, to some credit, echo nothing of specific fetishes, appearing to be only conjured up for the purpose of showing off their assets through the wonders of corsets, fishnets, leather, and panties.
If Snyder had not so enthusiastically proclaim that his film empowered females, then I’d have simply shrugged off this detail as nothing more than useless eye candy aimed for a particular demographic. However, he did say that, and that’s where the problem lies: between these women enjoying their own sexuality versus them creating sexually-charged avatars for a audience, I’d say under Snyder’s directing choices Sucker Punch leans towards the latter since, frankly, there’s no narrative establishment that suggests otherwise.
Worst of all, Snyder explicitly turns the viewer into sexual voyeurs, hypnotically leering at his cast of young actresses. The women, to be sure, are astonishingly beautiful, but they’re also ornate and never fully individuated to emotionally connect the material to the larger architecture of the story.
Strange enough, even the fantasy sequences – separate from Snyder’s serious misunderstanding of true feminism – failed to entertain me. For such elaborate worlds painted with the magic of CGI, the fantasy environment seemed largely to be used as uncreatively as possible (the use of follow-cam and lack of sufficient establishing shots didn’t help either). For so many explosions, bullets, shrapnel and steel occurring around, our five girls are surprisingly unattached from it all – physically, not philosophically – and besides the occasional one-on-one combat situations, they never really went out of their way to improvise with, say, a branch or helmet that was laying nearby. The visual space was largely unused as the girls went about their mission in a linear manner, never once taking advantage of the fact that they were essentially Gods in a fantasy of their own creation. It was nothing short of feeling trapped as the passive onlooker while someone else was playing within the goal-oriented constricts a video game – an utter disappointment, to say the least. Perhaps it’s the fault of what I can only infer as gratuitous use of green screen, where the actors are told to pretend to inhabit a world the filmmakers had yet to fully flesh out; regardless, it’s no excuse for a lack of innovation, considering Scott Pilgrim vs. The World accomplished the feat on a lower budget. If anything, I hoped to walk away from Sucker Punch with some sense of escapist enjoyment attached to its numerous fantasy segments – which, unfortunately, wasn’t the case.
So again we come back to the core problem Snyder and Shibuya faced: how to glorify aesthetics enjoyed by fans of anime and campy overdrive while incorporating real female empowerment. Such a challenge was met and executed by Quentin Tarantino back in 2003 with the installment of Kill Bill, a glorified revenge narrative that had one simple goal: make it fun.
The famous fight scene in “Kill Bill” where the Bride squares off against Gogo and the Crazy ‘88s – a revenge flick to its greatest glory.
Kill Bill, at the core of the stylized dialogue and attuned fighting choreography by Yuen Woo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), never let up the pretense that it was anything more than a perfect execution of aesthetics and genre conventions. Themes never echoed beyond their basic roots, never truly challenging the audience to actually think beyond what was happening on screen since what really mattered was style. And in the process of stylizing everything, Tarantino also stylized his characters, in particular his women, to be fleshed-out personas with something more interesting to say and do beyond their own sexual appeal and physical prowess. Some aspects of the revenge epic are so outrageously unrealistic and aestheticized that, in effect, you can sense Tarantino winking at us, “It’s only a movie.” And indeed, what we see in Kill Bill is through a stylized lens that morphs an otherwise psychologically traumatizing aspect into exploitative and, frankly, fun entertainment. That’s what made Kill Bill work: it lived up to what it set out do, and exceedingly well at that.
Sucker Punch, as opposed to what was advertised in trailers, tried to do more than just be fun, and failed in the process. By stepping away from camp for the sake of camp, the bizarre for the hell of being incongruous, Snyder and Shibuya tried to incorporate a linking narrative that held together what was otherwise a hodgepodge of video game and anime cliches; and in creating the linking narrative, they nonetheless created one under the guise (or misconception) of female empowerment amongst a suppressive male world, inadvertently mixing in a very jarring and uncomfortable mix of misogyny and disconcerting voyeurism. The overarching narrative is Baby Doll’s reality, where she and other girls are exploited by men who consider female mental patients a desirable fetish, which in turns drives Baby Doll to fantasize about escape and power while suspiciously still sexually appeasing to the male gaze. This linking narrative is, without a doubt, the biggest mistake Snyder and Shibuya made as a writing team.
In “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” director Edgar Wright celebrated the pop culture glory of video games and was especially creative in how he used the environmental space to choreograph and convey Scott fighting. In this scene, where Scott is confronted with Ramona’s fourth evil ex, Roxy, we get a sense of how “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” used its budget better to appeal its particular demographic of video game and anime fans – something “Sucker Punch” did not live up to. Above all else, watching this cohesive fight sequence is especially entertaining – and not to mention that we get to see two girls beat the living crap out of one another, and tastefully too.
In Dead Fantasy II, Monty Oum manages to create an interesting fight sequence by referencing Jackie Chan’s “Drunken Master” amidst volcanic lava. The fighting scenarios are physically impossible and as preposterous as anime and video games get, which is exactly what fans of such enjoy. “Sucker Punch’s” fantasy sequences seemed to aspire towards this level of inanity, but unfortunately I found the sequences surprisingly baseline action, lacking in the sort of creativity and environmental interaction that Monty Oum demonstrates in the above clip.
I suspect Sucker Punch might have worked better as an episodic format, where there are consistent set of characters that go up against new challenges and environments, each episode a self-contained fantasy segment that is detached from any overarching reality or narrative. This approach is what originally drove Monty Oum’s Dead Fantasy project and other likewise over the top action-fantasy-scifi mixups: in Monty Oum’s case, this involved pairing up characters from the Final Fantasy and Dead or Alive game series into nothing short of sexy female characters beating the crap out of one another. Dead Fantasy is preposterous, outrageous, and nonetheless entertaining, and is something Sucker Punch could have easily achieved had it not insisted on a feature length narrative.
Instead, we get a clumpy, clumsy theatrical release that incorrectly proclaims feminism, female empowerment and a girl’s escapism as an excuse to exercise what is nothing short of a male gaze fantasy. Sadly, in trying to appeal to two demographics – fans of wide-eyed, baby-faced school girls wielding samurai swords and guns and those who want to see more empowered female presence on screen – Snyder failed at both. The fantasy sequences weren’t nearly over the top nor creative enough to warrant significant fun, and the reality sequences were so jarringly misogynistic that it boiled down to a portrait of female victimhood, not female empowerment. At the end of it all, I couldn’t have cared less about the numerous anachronism, if there was a reality within a reality, a fantasy within a fantasy, or whatever the hell was really happening within the proscenium stage in the opening – it had not been an enjoyable viewing experience, period.
His scripts aren’t incoherent, they’re simply expressive of a positively infantillic understanding of the powers of symbols, much in the way that comic book artists and video game artists can only ever think in the titillation of an image and not its meaning… Snyder at the very least confines his scope to positively pubescent pursuits, however tired and overdone those may be.
I wish this wasn’t the case, but unfortunately it is with Snyder's Sucker Punch. I fear, most of all, that Warner Bros will look at the box office numbers and conclude that the audience doesn't want to see strong females in the forefront, leading to a looping pattern of no strong leading female stories being green-lit (a proposal that made internet headlines back in 2007).
At the end of it all, I like Zack Snyder. He, an indisputably talented visual director with a knack for seamlessly integrating music with imagery in spite of all of his narrative flaws, is earnest and enthusiastic. He is, however, still especially juvenile in his creative endeavors, which became very clear in how his directing choices were jarringly disjointed from the original content in his third feature Watchmen (awkward sex scene much?). I don’t believe he intended to force his actresses into a misogynistic lens, nor do I believe he is misogynistic like Frank Miller or self-indulgent and unwilling to aspire to what he should do beyond what he could do like George Lucas, Michael Bay, or M. Night Shyamalan. I believe, more than anything, that he still has a lot to learn.
He has a long way to go if he ever wants to be considered more than a director of visual orgies, and a lot to learn regarding how he frames his characters, what he chooses to aestheticize, and what the direct and indirect implications are of his directing choices beyond a pop culture surface. He is more than capable of overcoming his current barriers, smiles and all, and I hope that in one of his future projects, we’ll catch him winking at the audience,
“It’s only a movie."
Note: thank you to Viet Le for again for his insightful commentary that helped me shape my thoughts on "Sucker Punch."
…
Opening of "Sucker Punch” and additional footage
“Sucker Punch” Featurette
Zack Snyder at Comic Con 2010, talking about “Sucker Punch”
Zack Snyder interview about “Sucker Punch” with the LATimes
Zack Snyder “Sucker Punch” interview with Leicester Square TV
If there is anything I’d like to see change in my lifetime, please for the love of Brad Bird, Sylvain Chomet, Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyzaki, Nick Park, Andrew Stanton, Isao Takahata – please change that damn award category “Best Animated Picture” to “Best Animation for a Feature Length Film,” or even “Best Animation” for short.
Why would I implore such a change, you ask? It’s simple really: I’m tired of everyone thinking animation is a genre –
The distinction couldn’t be clearer and more important. To regard animation as a genre implies that any narrative that animators bring to life automatically relinquishes any sense of seriousness or weight for adult sensitivities, instead caters to the attention span of ADD children coked up on glucose with horrendous retrofit 3D and the comic timing and intellect of cow manure. So when the Academy calls an award category “Best Animated Picture,” they are implying that somehow, by virtue of being animated, narratives told via animation rather than live action are diluted and dumbed down, stupid even.
Oh Academy please, if you could look past your long history of Disney fare and see that beyond what an American animator and entrepreneur sold to the mass public there are artists out there frustrated by the restraints of big animation studios turning down quieter, smarter, darker scripts for interest of preserving their business – not creating, mind you, but preserving it. They ask themselves, “why risk it if the public wants cheese for cheese’s sake, packaged as kid-friendly because they’re animated?” There are artists out there outside of Pixar and Dreamworks, creating stories with the magic of animation that live action could never, ever come close to accomplishing. When I hear your presenters saying “Persepolis” is unusual because it’s animated but adult-oriented, a little part of me hits itself against an imaginary wall, hoping that this performance act stunt will shed some light on your own ignorance of what animation can accomplish beyond musical sashays and sassy side characters.
When you say “Best Animated Picture,” you instantly stratify animated narratives into a separate cohort, a subcategory to live action regardless of the narrative’s quality or characteristics. You instantly say films like “Grave of the Fireflies” are the intellectual and narrative equivalent of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”; you assume the “The Illusionist” is as emotionally acute as “Madagascar”; worst yet, you bring films as politically charged as “Persepolis” or psychological subversive as “Paprika” down as the equivalent of stupidly written films like “Alpha and Omega” or “Shrek 4” – a virtue resultant of these narratives being animated rather filmed live, no doubt.
So tell me, Academy, what’s it going to take for you to realize that animation is a medium and not a genre? How many more animated films are you going to see willingly that run contrary to your expectations of princesses singing about faux feministic independence while they wait on their prince from their domestic royal chamber?
When people see the award category “Best Cinematography,” do they think the lighting is a designate genre? No. So why the same for “Best Animated Picture,” where most Academy voters consider animation as a genre despite animation being a highly, incredibly meticulous technical process? Cinematographers create the illusion of perfect lighting on every star in every shot, are masters of making people and sets look good; animators create the illusion of movement, drawing and redrawing and drawing again primary and secondary motions, facial expressions, and numerous other gestures that the everyday observer takes for granted in their perception of the world. Animation is just as technically important as cinematography, and vice versa – both are necessary components of creating a comprehensive narrative. It just so happens that people tend to notice the narrative contribution of animation more than that of cinematography, and too easily are influenced by Disney precursors into believing all animated narratives lie in the same narrative framework. It all falls back to most moviegoers believing that narratives told via animation has the narrative potential of cheese nips, oblivious to the fact that they are observing astute, detail oriented animators from all departments working tirelessly to create the same illusion cinematographers do in live action film.
So please, Academy, wake up and hear my cries that so many cinephiles and animation enthusiast have been screaming out for years – animation is not a genre, so stop treating it like so and change that damn award category to reflect this understanding. I’m tired of having to explain to people why “Grave of the Fireflies” is one of the greatest anti-war films to date, or why “The Triplets of Belleville” is a worthwhile example of superb animation despite rejecting Disney aesthetics of clean lines and bright colors, or why “Wall-E” was one of the greatest dares in modern narrative when it omitted syntactical dialogue for the first forty minutes, and why it deserved that “Best Picture” nomination over “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” period.
I hope you’ll see that animation lends itself to potential live action could never, ever dream of tapping into, that under the hand of apt technicians like any other film production animation can dive into the deepest cores of our psyche, of hopes and dreams, and everything in between.
“The Thief and the Cobbler – Recobbled Edition,” 1993 (Note: I watched the fanmade “Recobbled” cut that was put together in the aftermath of the film being destroyed by its distributing studios, which you can read about here).
One of the more subtle aspects of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika is the love triangle revolving around Chiba/Paprika (or love tetramer, depending on how you look at it). Three men are romantically interested in the central female figure – one for the idea of Paprika, one for the idea of Chiba, and one simply for the idea that shapes Chiba/Paprika.
Paprika is explicitly a dream about movies while more implicitly one about ideas and our projections, particularly love. Known as the Ice Queen in her physical form, Psychiatrist Atsuko Chiba takes on the alternate ego Paprika to help with her patients outside her research facility, one of them being Detective Toshimi Konakawa who invariably falls for the allure and charm of Chiba’s dream avatar. Amongst her colleagues at the research facility for the DC Mini – the futuristic device which allows people to view other’s dreams and explore subconscious thought on screen – there is Doctor Morio Osanai, a man who admires the icily beautiful surface of a guarded Chiba while simultaneously intimated by her intellectual prowess (a insecurity he later overcomes at the expense of Chiba/Paprika, for those familiar with the film). Lastly, there is Doctor Kōsaku Tokita, a man who loves Chiba/Paprika for who she is regardless of her self-projections in the real and dream worlds.
It’s important to distinguish the different forms of love each man develops for Chiba/Atsuko because it funnels down to which man she eventually chooses. Love, as we all know, is fickle: I know friends and relatives who’ve fallen in love with their own projections of another, for a figment of somebody they amplify tenfold in hopes that this figment is central to the person of interest. I, too, have fallen victim to this tendency in the past. Falling in love with an our own idea of a person rather than the idea that defines said person is all too common of a human mistake most of us have make in our lives.
Why don’t you listen? You’re a part of me!
Have you ever thought that maybe you’re a part of me?
An idea is alluring, and for the lucky few the figment of an idea we fall in love with is the defining essence of a person. More powerful than words can describe an idea can take root in the deepest of our subconscious, even possessing us well past the point of reason and objectivity. That ideas should be so intertwined with dreams and projections that question boundaries between reality and fiction is no coincidence: like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Kon’s Paprika illustrates for us how vibrantly our own ideas and images can take root in the scheme of our own sleeping minds, how in one moment we can seamlessly be walking down the corridors of a hotel and suddenly find ourselves within the waves of a naval portrait, riding the waves away from a recurring, haunting projection that we understand little about.
Shades of ideas, albeit alluring and attractive, can be disappointing and dangerous. They can tie us down into the obscurity of denial or an unwillingness to accept things that are not within our control. In Inception, Dom Cobb recreates a captivating but ultimately dangerous shade of his deceased wife Mal, a shade that culminates so fervently it inhibits his own ability to block her projection from invading his own dream state. In Paprika, the Chairman of Chiba’s institute becomes so obsessed with protecting the “purity of dreams” that he begins first by taking over other’s physical bodies (as his own physical state is crippled) and then slowly infecting other’s minds with delusions not dissimilar to symptoms of dementia; eventually, he manifests into nightmarish forms to ward off Chiba/Paprika from stopping him as he eventually infects Tokyo with his projections of fantasy, invading the real world with dangerous abodes of the fantastic masking venomous undertones. Both Cobb and the Chairman become obsessed with projecting an idea that eventually, they fall victim to this obsession and ultimate destroy the integrity of an idea the hoped to maintain – a cruel irony, if you will.
It is no surprise either that we should become as enamored by ideas as equally as we could become terrified of them, tortured even. Detective Konakawa, for all we know, falls in love with Paprika because within his recurring hell of nightmares she is a figure of hope, comfort, and warmth, a guiding light that helps him navigate within his own spectrum of dreaming. Of course, when Konakawa realizes Paprika is the dream avatar of the distant Chiba, he remains enamored with the idea of Paprika until it becomes apparent his romantic projection is only a projection, nothing more – he has absolutely no chance of becoming romantically involved with the real life Chiba, regardless if Paprika is a subset or dominant quality of her personality. For Konakawa, Paprika is a idea of charm and comfort, something he desires after years of being haunted by the same specter of his past and buried regret.
The infamous rape scene in Paprika
Konakawa’s sentiment is a similar albeit different circumstance than that of Osanai, who is enamored with Chiba for her beauty – undoubtedly tremendous – but holds back because she is his superior by intellect and rank, something he cannot overcome in the real world. He loves the idea of Chiba, the idea that she is a captivatingly mysterious and gorgeous woman who encompasses in his mind all that is perfect and desirable – intelligence and sex. Osanai’s projection of Chiba is a twisted one, mixed with both a small understanding of whom Chiba is and with his own lust and jealousy, insecurity even. This leads to one of the film’s most notorious scenes where Osanai captures Paprika and effectively rapes her, peeling away her skin to reveal a underlaying Chiba. This power play is a rape scene not in the traditional meaning, but in the sense that a man’s insecurities paramount to him violating another’s projection, mutilating it into the idea he wants to see – Chiba over Paprika. Sickening and abhorrently low, Osanai’s power play implies not only his obsession with his own projection of whom he believes Chiba to be, but also an obsession with his own ego where given the power he will manipulate and twist anything into his own design – clearly the compulsion of a man with deep-rooted insecurities matched by equally blatant narcissism.
Then there is Tokita, who is nothing more than a child in the shell of a morbidly obese genius in love with the idea of creating and dreams – the very idea Chiba/Paprika is also in love with. I’ve heard many comments from fans who liked the idea of “the fat guy getting the girl” rather than stereotypical narrative cliches, but the love between Chiba and Tokita deserves more praise than that. It is a love that stems from an idea that two people sense and understand, an idea that is otherwise obscure to others unwilling or incapable of seeing it. I’m referring of course specifically to Chiba’s true inner self, the self that lies beneath her physical and fantastical projections. What it is we cannot truly define: what is evident is that this idea resonates with Tokita’s character, who is enamored by the process of creating and exploring, and simply having fun with it while you’re at it. He loves not just a shade of Chiba, but all of her shades, and she likewise him.
The significance of Chiba’s love for Tokita and his love for her cannot be understated in the scheme of Paprika and the ideas and projections that invariably coincide with the existence of dreams. It speaks not only of love unfettered by pretense or faulty projection from either party, but also of ideas culminating into a collective identity and how easily an idea – whether fragmental or representative – can take hold us so strongly that we believe it to be true, even tempted to twist into our own desires and projection. Such is the nature of dreams, of projections, of ideas, and of ourselves.
Many thanks for the contributions made by Viet Le and Allan Estrella for this article.
At one point a reporter asks the sullen actor this question as he slouches on a table during a press conference. He looks back, empty, unable to answer.
Such is the tone for Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, perhaps her most personal film to date. It observes the life of a man who finds himself listless, oversaturated with the whoops and bells that is the Hollywood glamour life. Fame, fortune, femme – he has these all at his disposal. For some, this is more than enough – it is something to be desired, to aspire towards and more often than not reinforced as the ideal by celebrity news gossip and fickle entertainment news outlets. For Johnny Marco, no amount of sex, booze, drugs or goodies can wash away the inevitable truth – that he is nothing. I suspect he indulges to delay the onset of this eventual realization.
Somewhere is a daring film despite its quietness characteristic of Ms. Coppola. It examines the life of a character not traveling within a foreign country or having existed centuries prior, but a man who lives here in Los Angeles, the hub of Hollywood and of celebrity America looks upon with hungry lust and vicious savagery. Look around the internet and tabloid stands and it’s obvious: many people don’t register that a famous face and body belongs to an actual living a person, a person with feelings, abilities and inabilities as human as we ourselves are. The commonplace of horrid nitpicking and hyper romanticization of who a celebrity-actor is is nothing short of dehumanization as countless photos and videos, flattering and not, surface on a day to day basis since, after all, their glamour and wealth must be more interesting than the mundanity of our own lives; to even fathom that they could even be bored or disenchanted with such a lifestyle is completely out of the question. It is much easier to idolize and criticize a person when they stand behind a tinted window of our construction, a bellowing sea of voices directed and funneled down to their very presence.
Sophia Coppola breaks down this separation by examining an equally mundane (if not more so) life of an actor who finds no joy in anything his current lifestyle offers – he simply continues doing it because there’s nothing else to do.
Make no mistake – Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is in a position where he can afford to be listless amongst a sea of privileges and opportunities. This is not a position many can emphasize with, nonetheless understand: Johnny’s daily life revolves around photo shoots, press conferences, and waking up midday at the Chateau Marmont in the never ending sun of Southern California.
You would think such a situation lends itself to more excitement like the nightlife of Las Vegas. Not Johnny Marco: we see him like we see Vegas during the daytime from the suburbs – empty, monetary, and sad. The illusion is gone, and we are left with Johnny as he falls asleep during sex, weaves awkwardly through a party, and sits for forty five minutes while waiting for a mold to dry around his entire head save his nostrils. No violent paparazzi, no club scenes, no red carpets, just a listless man as he impulsively drives around the sun drenched streets of privileged LA.
When his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) steps into Johnny’s life, Coppola wisely steps away from indulging in cliches of character change because frankly, people don’t change just like that. Change requires change of habit, habits that exist because they are comfortable and everyday. Johnny Marco is no different.
Cleo is not a drastically different person than Johnny, she’s simply different in the sense that is not like Johnny and simply loves him because he is her father. Coppola thoughtfully avoids painting her as precocious, hyper intelligent or comically childish; we instead see a young girl on the brink of puberty, perfectly aware of her surroundings and situation but undeterred from simply being herself. No Hannah Montana, no obnoxious pink or Justin Bieber ogling, just a young girl who wants to and likes spending time a father who is always away.
I suspect Coppola directly or indirectly projects her own experiences and mannerisms onto Cleo, especially given the high profile life of her own father Francis Coppola as she grew up and eventually starred in one of his movies. Cleo is observant and quiet, only once straying from her nonjudgmental demeanor when she eats breakfast with a sultry Italian woman Johnny slept with after she’d fallen asleep. And who can blame her? I can tell you, too, that the eyes of your own child judging you are probably the hardest eyes to look at directly simply because they know something you’re unwilling to admit or live up to.
Johnny’s change is not so much lifestyle or habit (these change and are modified to an extent of course) but is how he comes to understand himself and what he is willing to personally admit. Johnny Marco has not “been here” for a long, long time, and he knows it – the challenging part is acknowledging it, and that’s why Cleo’s presence is such a cathartic wake-up call from the mundanity of his own indulgences.
Sophia Coppola daringly challenges us to simply observe, to infer for ourselves the depths of loneliness Johnny Marco faces daily. Cuts are infrequent and interspersed rarely, further breaking the illusion that what happens on screen is just as exciting real life. I have yet to see anyone frame a pair of pole dancing blondes as unexciting and mundane as Ms. Coppola has accomplished.
Perhaps the only instance in Somewhere that breaks away from Coppola’s usual quietness is when Johnny drops Cleo off for camp. As he tells her “I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” a helicopter propeller turns faster and faster, obscuring his words from being heard correctly. Maybe it’s because the scene involves a helicopter, or that we can actually hear what Johnny says as opposed to Bob Harris’s words to Charlotte in Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The intimacy is lost for a split second to contrivance, but is instantly washed away by subsequent scenes where Coppola kindly invites us to sympathize with a now emptier, sadder Johnny Marco.
Coppola is one of the quietest modern directors around, which is an extraordinary feat considering how loud Hollywood has become. In watching her films I can’t help but think of Yasujiro Ozu, who was so minimalistic about camera movement that for him to even move a camera once within a cut was like anarchy. Ozu, too, was unobtrusively observant and sympathetic to his characters, allowing his viewers to observe and infer the nuances of emotions unspoken.
Coppola may be the greatest voice for the female presence in the world of film. While Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards, Coppola can masterfully convey moods in her films, moods that are unspoken and unquantifiable from a traditionally “masculinist” perspective. Most importantly her films are kind and nonjudgemental, allowing us to watch just as impartially as the characters on screen simply live, their quirks, habits and mannerisms not so different from our own. With Somewhere, she does this and more: Johnny and Cleo’s relationship is explicitly influenced by Coppola’s experiences with her father, and she allows us in to see not the events that took place, but the emotions and moods prevalent throughout her adolescence as she walked amongst the shadows of a filmmaking legend. She lets us into her heart and that of LA, which may make some moviegoers uncomfortable because there is nothing illusionary about it. For me, I couldn’t welcome it enough.
• Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” – This song played during a scene in Somewhere, and I couldn’t help but listen to it on repeat while I wrote this essay/article.
